A common test for any professional lighting designer is to create an impactful show no matter the size of the venue. Whether a small club or massive stadium, effective lighting energizes the audience, expresses the band’s artistry, and empowers the designer to use all the tools in their creative arsenal. Designer Ben Jarrett of Squeek Lights in Sayreville, NJ, checked all of those boxes and then some with his design for metalcore band Beartooth on its 2024 North American Tour.
More than a few people sitting close to the stage during Beartooth’s recently concluded 40-city North American tour, felt they were in an arena once the band’s 75-minute show started, even though, in actuality, they were in a theater or club venue. Early in the planning stages of the tour, Caleb Shomo, lead singer for Beartooth, told Victor Zeiser, head of Squeek Lights, that he wanted to hit the road with “an arena level production that works in clubs.” Jarrett had similar conversations with Shomo, “In our early design meetings, Caleb talked about bringing an arena-style show to smaller and mid-sized venues,” Jarrett said. “Whether that night’s stop was at a 3,000-capacity theater or a 900-capacity club, he wanted every show to come at you and feel like it was taking place in a much larger setting.”
To accomplish this, Jarrett and the Squeek Lights team knew the Beartooth stage had to generate immense lighting output to provide that big-arena feel from a smaller footprint. The band also wanted numerous special effects as part of the design, and lasers played a major part in creating those big, impactful moments. With a center stage video wall displaying a seemingly endless stream of stunning multi-layered images from Luke Shomo, the show created an arena-like vibe. This feeling was amplified by pyro effects and confetti cannons evoking powerful moods, laser patterns filling the air, empowered by X-Laser fixtures and Mercury Laser Control firmware, and intense flashes of bold light from CHAUVET Professional Maverick Storm and PXL fixtures transforming the stage.
With multiple venue sizes to consider, the right design required careful planning and hard work. “We had many ‘moving parts’ in this production,” said Jarrett. “We had to handle load in, lighting, lasers, the video wall, followspots, cameras, cryo jets and confetti blasters. Our venue size would change from 850 capacity to 3,000 capacity, so we rarely had the same load from one show to the next. Our team, Mel Lopez, the V2 Tech/followspot operator, and Gabe Osborn, L2 tech and special FX tech, deserve a lot of credit.” As they all navigated their way through the varied venues tour they figured out how to retain the essence of their show while adapting their rig to different stages. “Learning what aspects of the show were most important, and what would give us the most bang for our buck, was critical,” he said.
Lighting
Among the elements Jarrett considered critical he points to, “The six side towers with three Maverick Storm 2 BeamWashes and Maverick Storm 1 Hybrid on top were ‘high value,’ so we made sure to make it fit each day.” In addition to its 18 Maverick Storm 2 BeamWashes, the tour rig had six Maverick Storm 4 Profile fixtures, six Storm 4 Hybrids and six COLORado PXL Bar 16 motorized battens, arranged on the deck in line with the downstage edge of the drum riser.
Speaking of the fixtures in his rig, Jarrett noted: “The Storm 4 Profiles were instrumental in delivering the ‘arena level production’ Caleb was asking for. The show would start in complete black with the sounds of a storm playing though the P.A. Each night the audience would be snapped out of their preshow stupor with a blinding lighting crack from the Storm 4s pointed straight out into the audience. Then later in the song ‘Sunshine’ I used them to fill each space full of ‘sunrays’ by utilizing its awesome output power and zoom angles.”
“As for the Storm 2 BeamWashes, they were a lot of fun to program,” continued Jarrett. “The individual pixel control is everything I expect from a wash light, but more! They opened up a lot of split color looks and eye candy opportunities for me. We really loved making effects on these fixtures. Another pleasant surprise was how good the pre-built macros were. I would frequently switch between my programmed effects to a macro since they were so easy to control. This let me switch up the pixel chases in a snap and get wildly different effects flipping back and forth. Very cool.”
Jarrett used color to define moments based on the music during the show. “Beartooth has always had very solid colors define their album art, so that helped drive the overall ‘pink hue’ of the show,” he explained “When the band would play a known hit from another album, I would use that album’s color for the base color of that song. This color scheme matched up perfectly with the video content.”
In contrast to some previous Beartooth tours, which featured large guitar speaker cabinets as part of the design, this one had a more open stage, complemented by some evocative side lighting angles. “The band wanted a ‘clean’ stage this time around, which meant no big groups of cabinets and lighting fixtures off to the sides, so room could be made for the video element,” said Jarrett. This was, he notes, part of the client’s desire to create “arena looks” for the tour, which was exactly what was delivered, thanks to a deftly executed design that was big on excitement, even when there wasn’t a lot of space.
Lasers
A key to generating that visual excitement was the inclusion to this tour of lasers. The Beartooth 2024 North American Tour was Jarrett’s first tour using X-Laser fixtures and X-Laser Mercury Control. “It was all my programming and my design, and the true advantage is being able to integrate lasers with standard lights,” said Jarrett. “We at Squeek Lights used to assume that lasers were this other thing separate from regular lights and now with X-Laser Mercury, we have this other tool in our toolbox.”
The set included a total of eight X-Laser Skywriter fixtures, in both 5W and 10W varieties. They provided punch alongside the substantial video wall and the array of traditional lighting fixtures, and Jarrett expertly positioned the lasers for maximum effect regardless of where the show took place. “A nice thing about the lasers was that since they were mounted above the video wall, I could set their zones to be as wide as possible and fill the room horizontally with those awesome aerial laser effects,” explained Jarrett. “And on the days when the venue was narrower, I could simply layer the lasers on top of each other to still provide that big-venue impact look that we all wanted.”
Creating depth and dimension for the show was one of Jarrett’s goals that he accomplished using a varied color palette, which the X-Laser fixtures had no trouble matching. From desaturated pink to vivid yellow to rich green, as Jarrett had noted his use of many colors helped tell the story of each song visually. That palette helped build the big moments common on songs from Beartooth’s recently released album, Surface. “A lot of the songs on Surface have choruses that build into big moments and my programming reflected trying to fill the room and match the scale of those big musical moments,” Jarrett explained. “I also wanted to use a lot of bright colors to match the more positive feeling and vibe the band went with in their new material.”
The X-Laser Skywriter HPX M-5 and Skywriter HPX M-10 units fit the bill as showstopping impact effect fixtures, all while giving Jarrett the advantage of being able to program the entire timecoded show directly from his preferred grandMA2 lighting console. He’s already looking forward to integrating lasers into his designs for other Squeek Lights clients, no matter the venue or vibe. Certainly, the good vibes of the Beartooth tour extended to the positive reactions to his design that Jarrett received from fans, fellow artists, and crew while on the road.
This insightful coverage was shared with PLSN readers by CHAUVET Professional and X-Laser. Learn more about CHAUVET Professional at www.chauvetprofessional.com and X-Laser at www.x-laser.com/pro .
